


The Truth in Fractured Angles

by Ferith12



Category: DCU
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:21:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26326309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferith12/pseuds/Ferith12
Summary: “He has no right to be Robin,” Dick said.The words came out of him all on their own, the way words so often do in screaming arguments, bitter and burning on his tongue.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 49





	The Truth in Fractured Angles

“He has no right to be Robin,” Dick said.

The words came out of him all on their own, the way words so often do in screaming arguments, bitter and burning on his tongue. They were not words he would be proud of saying to Bruce, they were certainly not words he would ever let pass his lips had he known that Jason was listening. They were not even the words that he  _ meant _ , those might have been “you had no right to give Robin away”. But they were the words that came, loud and raw and unstoppable, unretractable once spoken.

Seven words. So small for a concept so large, for the way Dick’s stomach twisted at the sight of this stranger wearing his family’s colors. This child that Bruce sent to fight, as though Robin was a thing he made, as though any child would do, could, with a few pointers on how to punch good, replace Dick Grayson, prodigy of the Flying Graysons, the greatest trapeze artists in the world. Later on that part would haunt him, as though somehow, as illogical as it was, everything might have been alright if he had only taught Jason to fly. But for now, that boy that Dick did not know was listening didn’t matter. What mattered was Bruce and Robin, and betrayal. What mattered was that Bruce had taken something that was his mother’s and something that was his and given it away. As though everything that Dick had been or was or could be belonged to Bruce to do with as he liked.

(Bruce did not understand these things. Bruce had no legacy. Wayne Industries was his inheritance, but it was not his heritage or his culture or his home. Bruce had left the Manor of his own volition and returned to it, and it was so constant and solid that it had never occurred to him to consider what it meant. Dick never explained what Robin was, and Bruce did not ask, and Batman and Robin were said so often in one breath that Bruce forgot that they had never been nothing more than a matched set.)

Seven words that said everything, and explained nothing, preceded and followed in the roar of argument by countless others, careless and forgotten.

“He has no right to be Robin,” Dick said. And what he meant was “He has no right to my name, he has no right to my family’s colors, no right to the legacy of my father and his father and his father before him, he has no right to my heritage.”

But, of course, that is not what Jason heard. Jason, who had been called gutter trash, and charity case, and filth, Jason, who only knew Dick as Bruce’s better son, what Jason heard was “You have no right to stand where I once stood, you have no right to have what I gave up, you have no right to my home, you have no right to be considered worthy as I am worthy, you have no right to my father’s love.”


End file.
